391–400 of 624 posts
Some people have long commutes and wfh is great
Others have small, expensive apartments they paid for shorter commutes and it's suffocating 40-50 hours a week
Some people live in palaces and offices are a step down in comfort
Some people are happy with the online interactions
Some people are dissatisfied with the online interactions and prefer to talk to humans and not text strings from humans they can't see or hear
Some people want to work from home some of the time, and go to the office some of the time, and they've wanted that before the apocalypse occurred (puts hand up)
Cities are nervous that business districts are devastated since no one buys coffee, lunches or walks home and steps into a shoe store or tailor, or to a bar for drinks with colleagues.
But like much else in our present world, things are presented in black and white, emotive ways.
I miss being in the office so that I can go for coffees with people at morning tea, lunch and beers after work, I miss the human connection that cannot truely occur via via conferencing software, I miss walking around the city at lunch and even the 30-40 minute community to/from work (about half the time). I miss having a lunch room to sit and spitball ideas in that people truly, naturally walk in and out of, I miss…
Why do people continue to push this myth? “ Kirsty Allsopp led the anti-remote work charge on Twitter, suggesting that if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world. Who would have thought that a couple of months of working in shorts and a T-Shirt has made us more susceptible to being replaced by less expensive folk in India, Myanmar and China?” It doesn’t matter if they are American or…
1. I do wonder why in the US we permit discrimination based on place of residence and place of birth. You can legally discriminate based on accent or other indicators of your place of birth or development, but not legally discriminate for race, gender, sexual orientation. And similarly we are also permitting employers to discriminate based on where you choose, or life exigencies compel you, to live, modulo objective…
Presumably this works both ways. Google does not pay 500K/year to developers in the Portland office. Why should SF developers get paid more? Nobody cared until engineers out of SF wanted to take advantage of remote work but keep the big paycheck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world > I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it. Welp, I'm the CEO of a smart wearable device company ( https://pavlok.com ). We were based in Boston because everyone told me, and I believed you HAD to be in one place to build a startup, and DEF…
Sorry I was unclear. What I was trying to say is that if you haven't offshored your team already(i.e. moved part of your engineering operations to E. Europe, Asia, etc.), then you have a good reason for doing so. Offshoring engineering has been going on for decades at this point. Anyone threatening that working from home means your job is a target for offshoring(to someone else, not you in that location) is full of b…
One of the reasons why offshoring failed is that you needed to be in the office to have a 30 second chat about something that saved you a few minutes of digging to find it yourself, which added up quickly.
This is no longer the case.
There are still reasons to not offshore, but we do not know if they are enough to keep it from happening. These conversations tell you more about the mentality of the people having them than about the viability of offshoring.
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> I’d like the opportunity to work from the office again Is that a useful answer? Of course people would like that opportunity, even if they never used it - it's pure bonus. More useful question would be "how many times a week (or how many hours) do you plan to work from the office given the opportunity to work from both home and the office?"
It is useful because the company was trying to gauge how many wanted to work from home permanently and wouldn’t care if they never had an office to go to.
I like working from home right now, but I’d sure love the world to be working such that we could reasonably go back to the office.
There’s a balance to be had, which remains to be seen. I personally will choose a flexible company that allows remote work 100% of the time. I prefer to work in increments spread throughout the day, not a strictly regimented 9-5 which office environments encourage.
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Commute time is a big thing here. People who have a 2 hour (one way) commute from hell from their massive house are super happy about this situation (shocking, I know). People who live in a small studio apartment 10 minutes from the office see it differently. What I expect this to result in is employers increasingly forcing people to WFH (either outright, or by making the offices horribly unattractive through hot-des…
The real estate is not a cost if you have an office setup at home anyway. As a computer programmer, why would I not? Cleaning and maintenance of that office is just part of what I do. Almost any commute is going to outweigh those factors.
Not everybody’s situation is the same. I really liked my situation before COVID. I had a 10 minute walk to work, a large public park across the street where the city maintained the “yard”, and I saw my daughter for hours most evenings. Many co-workers who lived further out barely saw their kids during the week.
Obviously, COVID has caused a lot of people who love urban living to take a hard look at it. Living in a city loses its appeal when all the amenities are closed/gone, but the real estate “is not a cost” is not true for everybody. An extra bedroom where I live would have been hundreds of thousands more. We elected not to spend the money because, well, I had a desk at the office and we were only going to have one kid.
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Anywhere where you: - Have reasonable fast internet. - (Affordable) Hospitals/Police/Firewatch in reasonable distance - Are not to far away from the companies office as you likely still have to go to the office from time to time. EDIT: Most people don't live in Tokyo or cities with similar expensive housings. The cost of moving away from cities is often much bigger then "just" longer transit times from home to work.
Thinking long term, housing is expensive because of mandatory office going, so removing the pressure from that side should in theory affect prices
This is a complicated problem with different perspectives that no doubt will get muddled at some point. I'm confident at least the following is true: Some people have long commutes and wfh is great Others have small, expensive apartments they paid for shorter commutes and it's suffocating 40-50 hours a week Some people live in palaces and offices are a step down in comfort Some people are happy with the online intera…